The Purpose of Testing
The College Board made headlines again this week. “The SAT Suite of Assessments is Going Digital!” (Note that the SAT is now a “Suite” incorporating the SAT, the PSAT, and their progeny: PSAT 10 and PSAT 8/9.)
Sophomore, junior, and senior families can stop reading; the change will only impact Grade 9 and beyond.
I remember clearly a presentation at a College Board Forum well over 20 years ago given by some of the team working—as early as then—on a digital version of the exam. One of the developers noted that they could get closer to a student’s “true” score with eight questions on a computer-based test than with a hundred static questions on paper. Then the digital SAT receded into the haze. At first, College Board must have been waiting for technology to become pervasive enough to rely on. Then, I think, they just waited until the move would benefit them in some dramatic way. (In my mind, I can hear the Wicked Witch of the West croaking: “I’ll bide my time…”)
My first programmable calculator from Texas Instruments came with a built-in game called “Hi-Lo.” One player picked a number between 1 and 256 which the other player attempted to divine. Player 2 would make a guess, then Player 1 would respond “Hi” if the conjecture was too high or “Lo” if it was too low. Like Tic-Tac-Toe, it did not take long to figure out the winning strategy, the Hi-Lo equivalent of “X in the center square.” When the calculator was guessing, its first attempt was always 128. Then it methodically moved halfway between successive guesses, reaching the correct answer in 8 tries or fewer, without fail.
That’s how an adaptive test, like this new incarnation of the SAT, works. It starts with a question of medium difficulty. If you get it right, it moves to a harder one; get it wrong and it offers an easier one. The new test will have more than eight questions, but far fewer than the paper version currently in use. It will still be administered in schools, but it’s an hour shorter, and kids will have their scores in a few days. In very many ways it is a better test.
“This week’s announcement leaves many tantalizingly unanswered questions, not the least of which is what ACT’s response will be.”
Weather forecasters are warning of another “bomb cyclone” moving up the coast this weekend, but those of us in college admissions have been keeping an eye for two years on two other tropical depressions, one over Princeton, NJ, the other over Iowa City, IA. Since the COVID-19 tsunami overran the world in March 2020, the College Board and its Midwest döppleganger ACT have been enveloped in an existential whirlwind.
Nearly all colleges went at least test-optional for the high school class of 2021. Most retained the policy for the class of 2022 and have pledged to do so for the class of 2023 and, in some cases, beyond. Only a handful of schools, albeit including the 800 pound University of California gorilla, have moved to test-blind, divesting themselves of test score consideration entirely.
Admissions offices have discovered, as I surmised they would, that they can admit an equally talented, more interesting, and often more diverse class without relying on standardized test scores. That said, the testing agencies are not likely to go quietly into the night. Applicants will continue to strive for ways to distinguish themselves, colleges will continue to value an additional objective data point, and College Board and ACT will continue to gleefully supply the magic metric that connects them.
This week’s announcement leaves many tantalizingly unanswered questions, not the least of which is what ACT’s response will be. However, it seems clear to me that the sudden wholesale shift to “test-optional” and “test-blind” admissions policies in the wake of the pandemic has left the multi-billion dollar testing behemoths in a desperate search for something we, at Browning, have engraved into our core: Purpose.